This is my entry in the FTF contest, #32 (32 weeks of empowering people!)

Dope entry, @f3nix. Digging the set up. I went classical with it.

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Awakenings

by the mighty @f3nix

The hoverbike lay abandoned on its side, the engine still warm. The fine black dust carried by the incessant wind was a snake that crept in every small recess.
From the top of the dune the Tesseract 19 could be seen with the naked eye. The column pierced the black sea of ​​graphite and challenged the dark crimson sky. The awareness of his distance made him wince. That construction was enormous. That impenetrable artifact, Moloch's sharpest tooth.

Intertwined with dust, the warm wind brought an imperceptible howl: the bark of the monolith, an omen of death.

The man waited, a stiff exoskeleton bent over the black sand. The helmet lay abandoned beside him. Soon the team would have arrived.

"Soon you will arrive too and everything will be accomplished, one way or another."

He thought of her smile, her courage, her strength. "My life, how could I've been so reckless to have you involved in all this?" The tears were already kneading blackened as the memories of their happy normality swept over him.

"I can not let them find me like this". He stared at himself from outside: another tower on a dune, far more uncertain than the one that howled his feral wish.

These and other demons echoed within the chambers of his soul, when his eyes met a green sprout. The man stared that little miracle that, against every odd, was striving to affirm its existence. In the midst of that sea of bottomless ​​despair.

The tear finally found its way lingering and bathed a leaf. The man managed to pull himself together and, now smiling, he put on his helmet.

"This Moloch will tremble, time has come for an awakening."

My Ending

The hoverbike wheezed as the old engines shifted on, pulsing and propelling him a meter above the desert. The sands blew and he glanced down at that fateful little sprout, hoping it hadn’t blown off and died from his bike.

Careless. You’re always careless. Everything you do…done…

Instead of blowing away from the force of the hoverbike, the sprout was…growing?

“Eh?”

He opened the visor of his helmet, checking to see if he had, in fact, been seeing things. But no. It was real. As the sand blew away, that sprout became a tender vine, no larger then a leafy-green finger. Then a proper vine. His intrigue and curiosity of something as impossible and beautiful as a plant growing in the desert began to shift into terror.

Plants don’t grow in the desert. And they certainly don’t grow into a vine. And they certainly don’t wiggle.

And all at once, those words from the drunk blind seer made sense. He’d sat in his hut and smacked the bone stick on the table, chanting away about the sand whales.

You were too caught up about here to realize. Just thought it was a tale. Just another dumb folk tale, metaphors for the spirit of their tribe.

The vine shot out, and he saw it as the hover bike fled at max speed.

How foolish he’d been to have once thought of that sprout as cute. It was a damn lure. An esca, if he felt being scientific about it. The sprout was a finger was a vine was a damn tree branch of a tenticular-fleshy esca, green as photosynthesis. Like a fin, it stood taught atop the head of what he could only describe as a worm with the face of a cat sans whiskers, the size of a skyscraper.

It was as they said.

“A god damn sand whale! Sand cat! Sand…fuck!”

It roared and gave chase, twisting and lumbering after him. The entirety of the ground gave way as the full weight of the whale’s enormity sprung from the sands. The hover bike was already at it’s max speed. He turned to see behind him and wished he hadn’t.

The whale’s mouth was open. Talons and spines lined the inside of its mouth like a lamprey eel. The tongue, a flagpole of flesh and muscle, wiggled, beckoning him to meet his end.

Before it swallowed him whole, he thought about her and what he’d say. How he’d have to tell her how sorry he was that a mythical creature ate him before he could apologize for getting mixed up in the tesseracts.

It became night. The engines of the bike crushed under the monster’s teeth and he fell. Then it was hot and stick and tight, almost lewd with pulsating muscles. He gripped a talon, almost piercing his throat, then slipped again and fell deeper into the creature’s esophagus.

Then finally, he fell good and long onto a pile of wet sand.

“Fucking hell.”